"You Ashcroft!"

On a recent international flight aboard Northwest Airlines, a reporter was pleased to learn that the movie would be Sideways, the popular Alexander Payne film that has uncorked a million bottles of pinot noir. Of course, in-flight entertainment is notoriously prudish about dirty words. Sideways is a film that has a full nose and thick legs when it comes to rough language, so it posed a challenge to airline entertainment directors. By tradition, this sort of thing is covered with clumsy overdubs—“fudge,” “shoot,” “darn,” that kind of thing. But for some reason in Sideways, the frequently uttered word “asshole” was overdubbed “Ashcroft.” That was a new one, as far as anyone could say. It seemed a rather bold move for Northwest.

Kurt Ebenhoch, the airline’s spokesman, said, “We simply asked for an edited version of the movie because the unedited version contains some sexual content.” When those are the only two choices, it becomes obvious why airlines would settle for a few “Ashcrofts” in place of the full-frontal that occurs in the earthbound version. But that still didn’t answer who decided that “Ashcroft” should be a synonym for the unmentionable. The reporter called Sideways’ distributor, Fox Searchlight Pictures, and asked to speak with the people in charge of dubbing films for airlines.

The call was put through to the department in charge of desalinating the naughty films Hollywood gives us. Mr. Blakeley is the man in charge, and he is ninety years old, so the caller was urged to “be patient.” Well, it turns out that Mr. Blakeley wasn’t available at the moment, but his assistant, Rudolph “call me Rudy” Freeman was. Rudy was glad to give the lowdown on the cleanup process that turns “ass” to “butt,” “bastard” to “bad guy” and, in Sideways, “asshole” to “Ashcroft.”

For airlines in particular, Freeman said, “Most don’t want to have anything that has to do with airplane crashes, too much blood, profanity and killings.” Fair enough. But surely showing a few good crash scenes could up the alcohol sales a mite. Anyway, enough with the small talk. What about the dirty stuff? Freeman referred to The List. Circulating the office at Fox Searchlight is a master list of all the most common bad words and racial no-no’s that they have authority to modify. Freeman was kind enough to fax over this master list, and to give several artful examples of their best dubbing work. “For instance the four-letter word. Instead of using that, they’ll say ‘frigid’ or ‘phooey.’ Like for instance ‘g-damn.’ We can’t have ‘God,’ and we can’t have, ‘Oh Jesus,’ or anything like that …” Rudy went on for a while, swearing and cleaning up, so the reporter really got the hang of it. So when did “Ashcroft” get worked into the repertoire alongside “animal, officer, turkey, rascal, airhead” as an acceptable substitution? As it turns out, it didn’t.

Rudy explained that directors will sometimes supply alternative dialogue to be dubbed in for edited versions of their films. For Ashcroft, he said, “Well, it just so happens they gave us that word. It was a director’s choice. We would not have used that.”

A true aficionado of his craft, Rudy agreed that Ashcroft was a “unique” substitution. He said, “Not only that, it didn’t fit the mouth too well. You can tell the difference between the syllables.” What was Payne thinking?—Kelli Ohrtman